U.S. Attorney Tristram Coffin speaks at a news conference Monday at the federal courthouse in Rutland about efforts to combat heroin trafficking in Vermont. / ANTHONY EDWARDS/Rutland Herald

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RUTLAND — Jeffrey Boobar, lead agent for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration in Vermont, has a message for the people behind the trafficking of heroin and other opiates in Vermont.

“We are going to do everything we can to reach out and find you, and we’re going to bring you back to Vermont to face justice,” Boobar declared at a news conference Monday at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Rutland.

Boobar was one of 14 federal, state and local law-enforcement officials who turned out for the event, the first of two planned in the state this month to unveil an intensified effort to reverse the state’s burgeoning heroin problem in the next few months.

Those efforts are expected to include setting up teams of federal and local investigators this summer to focus on locations where suspected drug trafficking is most prevalent, said Tristram Coffin, the U.S. attorney for Vermont.

A second news conference on the topic is planned for Burlington next Monday.

“We’ve seen increasing amounts of heroin on the street here in Rutland, but also in many places in Vermont: Burlington, Barre, other places,” Coffin said Monday. “I believe that with concerted law-enforcement efforts, we’re going to be able to chop that down.”

Burlington Police Chief Michael Schirling said in an interview later Monday that Burlington and Chittenden County are experiencing many of the same crime issues and other problems caused by the influx of heroin.

“It’s not like that’s different here than it is in Rutland than in Burlington or Barre or Highgate or Swanton or Brandon,” Schirling said. He did not attend the Rutland briefing.

The chief said many of the drug suppliers in Vermont hail not just from Brooklyn or the Bronx in New York but from cities as far away as Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia.

“We want to get the message out to all of them that if you come to Vermont, you’re going to do federal time, that there’s a completely different level of scrutiny here than anywhere else,” Schirling said.

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Schirling’s remark comes in the aftermath of several high-profile raids carried out by Burlington police in the past month. One of the raids targeted a Megabus parked on the University of Vermont campus and resulted in the arrest of three people and the seizure of 1,400 bags of heroin, 1,000 oxycodone pills and 4.2 ounces of crack cocaine.

Law enforcement officials at the Rutland event stressed that there was no way to, as Coffin put it, “arrest our way out of the problem.” Treatment and preventive education is part of the solution, he said. Last week, the Rutland Regional Medical Center agreed to open a methadone treatment facility in October.

“We’ve been pretty outspoken about the need for treatment,” Rutland Police Chief Jim Baker said. “We’re seeing enormous numbers of seizures of bags of heroin, but we don’t have the treatment in place right now to deal with the folks that are driving up the demand.”

Schirling, in his interview, echoed Baker’s comment. He said Burlington’s methadone clinic is treating 450 patients and has a waiting list of 720 more.

“That addicted population are not folks you expect to see on TV,” he said. “They could be anybody.”

Baker announced during the Rutland event that the city has applied for a $1 million Justice Department grant to help address the overall heroin problem in the Rutland area.

“The level of addiction in the city of Rutland is mind-boggling. There is no other way to describe it,” Baker said.

Coffin said his office, along with local prosecutors across the state, already are handling an increased number of heroin-trafficking cases, and more are in the pipeline.

“We have a number of ongoing investigations, and I believe we will be showing good signs of progress very soon,” Coffin said.